Untitled Theater Company #61's Festivals
Along with our individual productions, Untitled Theater Company #61 also has a history of
producing festivals. Here is a list of previous festivals:
In honor of Vaclav Havel's 70th birthday, Untitled Theater Company #61 and
other artists and companies from New York and around the country have came together to present,
for the first time anywhere, the complete plays of Vaclav Havel. With one world premiere, four
English language premieres and five other new translations, this was a must-see event for fans of
Havel, political theater, absurdist theater, or simply theater in general. Seventeen
fully-staged productions were presented in Manhattan and Brooklyn as well as other readings events throughout the city.
The first-ever theater festival dedicated to neurological conditions! NEUROfest was partly inspired by the work of famed
neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (“The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat”, “Awakenings”, et al), a writer
well regarded for his exploration of the creative revelations made through neurology. Science has long since
been a bedfellow to the arts, and NEUROfest will combine the two in a festival of over 20 plays, seminars and
readings about neurological conditions, ranging from aphasia to savantism to autism to Tourette's. Many of the
conditions have been popularized by Oliver Sacks' work. Others are lesser known, but all show the human mind
both hampered and augmented by its neurological state.
Untitled Theater Company #61's ninth season featured our Ionesco Festival,
the biggest event of our history.
From September 6 though December 16 of 2001, we presented a comprehensive festival
of all the works of Eugène Ionesco. It was an unprecedented festival for one of the
greatest playwrights of the last century, an icon of the Theater of the Absurd.
Not only did we have productions of every play
he has written in our festival, we also had an accompanying
film festival at
Anthology Film Archives,
seminars, readings,
and our unique Shorts Program of rotating one-act
curtain raisers. The Festival happened throughout New York City,
with the participation of over thirty other theater companies and institutions,
at a dozen different Venues. It would not have been possible without our
staff and sponsors
Untitled Theater's 24/7 Festival consisted of a week straight of plays created in a day!
The writers started writing at 10pm, and rehearsals began at 9am
of the next day. Then all the plays were presented at an 8pm performance.
Each day had a theme, and they were all part of Untitled Theater Company
#61's mission to present a modern Theater of the Absurd.